This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

I like the Philip Kaufman version, with Donald Sutherland. The ending, when the world is already occupied by body snatchers, you remember how the snatchers react when they see still humans? [Imitates Donald Sutherland’s gaping jaw howl] For years it became fashion among my friends to greet each other like this.

http://thephantomcountry.blogspot.de/2014/02/release-from-ideology-is-painful.html

heh seeing his initials like that made me think of

http://conversationalreading.com/images/S-Z-roland-barthes.jpg

My last revisionism: I quite liked—and I know this is the lowest of the lowest—the last two seasons of 24. You have Jack Bauer torturing, blah, blah, and you have Alison Taylor, good liberal president. They both got in the bad luck and break down. It shows very honestly how, within today’s universe, there is no way to be noble.

SF: You make me want to see it now.

SŽ: It’s not that good, I have to tell you. Life is too short. Fuck, even if you count out the publicity, it’s 24 times 45 minutes! Unless you are freak with nothing but time, it’s just too much.

SF: I like it, but it’s sort of falling back on titties.

Please Stop Worshipping the Superstar Professor Who Calls Students “Boring Idiots”

done

would like to hear the opinions of his students rather than some journalist with an agenda

when i took him for a class in grad school he was always polite + thoughtful when students spoke to him. i vaguely remember him complaining about US students v. european students who he felt were more respectful + humble v. US students who were kinda loud children. i thought he was otm.

She's just confirming the stereotypes that Americans have no sense of irony and consider good customer service to be the most important quality.

Mordy: did he ask for papers though?

Ironically, she sounds like a boring idiot.

when i took him for a class in grad school

have you ever mentioned this?

I watched Pervert's Guide to Ideology recently and enjoyed it, although I felt like it came apart toward the end. Also, I have a problem with "They Live"/red pill-type metaphors about ideology. I mean, I think they're useful to an extent because they explain ideology as the default mode of seeing rather than something that's only there when you deliberately employ it. However, these metaphors seem to give people the idea that one can just take the "truth pill" or put on the "truth glasses" and suddenly be free of ideology, which is bullshit.

read the sublime object if you're interested in a decent explanation of his notion of ideology

he contrasts it with marx's and althusser's early on

i feel like you're snarking me, markers bc surely i've mentioned that xp

also liked pervert's guide to ideology

and no, he didn't read the papers. avital ronell did. or one of her grad students. idk. who cares? papers are boring.

seeing isn't being free it's only seeing; i can't remember but i'm sure "they know but still they are doing" was in there somewhere.

i was kinda disappointed by this after pervert's guide to cinema, felt a lil thinner/glibber? v easy to stare at for 2.5 hours tho.

I generally get IA when people act like fucking babies about their professors.

xp I agree pervert's guide to cinema was better and a little more challenging too.

I thought maybe this one was meant to be a little bit more introductory.

I knew Mordy had taken a class by Zizek, so he's not making it up.

what can i say? i'm pretty valueless + empty w/ little to contribute or share beyond this one course i took more than half a decade ago. i'll never mention it again.

what was it about. did he assign his own books. were you radicalized. tell us stories.

helen vendler came to my masters program once and tough a class. that is my one brush with academic fame.

it was mostly about antigone, the family and the state. he assigned parallax from himself. the coolest thing i read in the course was derrida's glas. i wasn't radicalized. he told lots of filthy jokes that were very funny. some of the students in the course were doing some cool work. one particular guy was writing about haunted sites and collective trauma + memory in the south which i thought was very interesting.

i feel like you're snarking me, markers bc surely i've mentioned that xp

if you have i don't remember. no snark.

If I were Helen Vendler I wouldn't read papers either. I got a stack of"em staring at me.

how much of academia is people saying things are interesting

ideally all of it. practically 5%?

one particular guy was writing about haunted sites and collective trauma + memory in the south which i thought was very interesting.

i'd be interested in this

not saying interesting things Mordy saying things are interesting

We didn't really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn't already presume to be true – but it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around. One can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one gets pictures of what they were doing.

this is good http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/critique-of-zizek-on-kosovo-and-the-balkans-1/

reading "altai" by "wu ming" and there's a casual reference to a slavic seller of banned books called "gigek"

Yeah, ey, thanks for that, that was very interesting. Made me finally buy Badiou's Being and Event.

Frederik: you might find 'Normalizing the Balkans' by Dusan Bjelic interesting, too.

http://www.newsweek.com/did-marxist-philosophy-superstar-slavoj-zizek-plagiarize-white-nationalist-journal-258433

When Newsweek contacted Critical Inquiry, James Williams, its senior managing editor, agreed that Žižek “absolutely” borrowed from Hornbeck’s review. “We’re very sorry it happened,” he said. “If we had known Žižek was plagiarizing, we would have certainly asked him to remove the illegal passages.”

Newsweek then contacted Hornbeck, who writes under a pseudonym. “Anyone who has seen the side-by-side comparisons can have no doubt that Žižek is a plagiarist,” he said. “I know nothing about his writing habits. Maybe he does this all the time. Or it may be that as a prominent Marxist he didn’t want it known that he reads American Renaissance. In any case, what he did is contemptible, and his publisher...should certainly have a word with him.”

http://www.critical-theory.com/i-nonetheless-deeply-regret-the-incident-zizek-responds-to-plagiarism-allegations/

i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything

Yeah, he draws from Wikipedia regularly, so I can readily imagine him cutting and pasting text from email without bothering to see whether the email was quoting or paraphrasing a source.

Not to mention the nearly page-long passage (on The Matrix, I think?) in "On Belief" that he uses twice within the same chapter to introduce two different arguments.....

(On Leibniz and cyberspace, rather, on pages 26 and 52 of On Belief).

lol he plagiarized an anti-Semite. so zizek.

i dunno it seems pretty plausible that his general slovenliness explains pretty much everything

― j., Sunday, July 13, 2014 9:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is as much an alibi for him as a genuine cause of anything.

what is a genuine cause

fuck you :)

iunno. that smiley doesn't feel so genuine to me.

The first thing that such a "fundamentalist" view cannot see is how a foreign gaze is inscribed into the very establishment of "our" identity. Say, Argentinean identity formed itself in the middle of 19th century, when its main mythical motifs were established (the gaucho melancholy, etc.); however, all these motifs were already formulated in the memoirs European travelers a couple of decades earlier – what this means is that, from the very beginning, the Argentinean ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other’s gaze. The same holds even more for modern Greece: Athens were in 1800 a provincial peasant village of 10.000 inhabitants, they were not even the first capital of independent Greece. It was under the pressure of Western powers (mostly Germany and England) that the capital was moved to Athens where a series of neoclassic government buildings were constructed by Western architects; it was also the Westerners, fascinated by the Antiquity, who installed in Greeks the sense of continuity with Ancient Greece. Modern Greece thus literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.

The "plaigiarism" controversy seems overblown. The disputed passages are just summaries of other books, it's not like he plagiarized a white supremacist's ideas as the headlines suggest

it's been fun seeing academic types be all 'gotcha! the p-word!!!!' and just look like goobers tho